Florence Trust 2002

'Every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of
boundaries. The travelling self is here both the self that moves
physically from one place to another...and the self that embarks on an
undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between
home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture... between a here a
there and an elsewhere.'

Simon Parish keeps travelling on returning home. By recreating
photographs taken in Asia he exposes another layer of the traveller's
experience: how memory forges the 'other' and re-inserts it into the
familiar territory of home. We travel to re-discover ourselves as
subjects at home. We leave the beaten track, to tread where
indigenous people tread, to temporarily try to inhabit their
lives. The mundane architecture of space plays out differently
when its context is unfamiliar. Telephone wires above a service
station in Vietnam construct a composition that echoes something
known. Electric cables on a Bangkok street suggest modernity but
are hung in a new pattern the eye seeks to translate. Global
references like Texaco and Siemens heralds an international language
which provides a locating hook and salve for the gaze.

In many ways, Parish's striking paintings and drawings are about the
problematics of being a tourist. What is remarkable to him are not the
designated 'sights', but the everyday: the colourless sky over a motorway, the
sense of waiting at a roadside. He's concerned with systems of
connectedness, symptoms of communication: how a walkway is constructed on the
face of a mountain; the narrative of tyre tracks on a forecourt; how to
regenerate the palette of another place and hence evoke the feelings the
traveller felt, the mood, smells and discomfort a journey entails.

But his work is also about the tradition of landscape: from the
Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich to the constructed scenes of Jeff
Wall. How does the figurative painter inch into the space left
open by photography? How does painting render the depth of a scene
without nostalgia, without a veracity of emotional experience? How
does Parish communicate his longing for home in the sites of not
belonging?

'The paintings and drawings represent my changing relationship to
photography. Spatial connections are more vivid when you
travel. If photography tends to flatten that out, then painting
puts it back.'

Parish ably resolves the tension between the desire for a
photo-realist rendering of place and letting the paint break out of that
tradition to edge into something less clearly defined and more visually
malleable. He contests the fact that photographs are seen as an
objective rendering of otherness and allows us to see how much the
foreigness of place is shaped by who the witness is and the means they
use to express their experience. In placing us as spectators in
front of his after-images of otherness, Parish gives us that
nice-not-nice sensation of not quite knowing who we are. He makes
us travel outside ourselves and see how we look, anew.